I make it a point in every interview I go through to ask whomever is interviewing me how the work-life balance is. I trust they will be honest with me regardless of their position. Of course, I understand that if I’m interviewing with a VP (which I’ve done several times over the past couple of years), their answer may not be entirely truthful. I give them the benefit of the doubt anyway.
I’m not someone who quits early without good reason and I would describe myself as loyal. I give 110% to whomever I’m working for/with. If they took a chance on me, I would give them their money’s worth.
I spent almost six years at my first job ever. While we all knew it wasn’t a forever job for me, I enjoyed it very much. Management was great, my coworkers were great, and I even had regular customers I enjoyed seeing and servicing. I don’t love customer service, but this may have been an exception. If we needed time off to school, sports, or just to exist, we were granted that and management graciously worked around us. In fact, they preferred hiring school kids because of how easily they could move their schedules around and they were always willing to assist us where they could. This set a bar for me in my work life.
In the job after that I only lasted a year and a half before I threw in the towel and walked out with no notice. I walked past my boss in the doorway saying, “Sorry, Jack. I quit.” It was a good “first job out of college” and I enjoyed the work, my colleagues, even some of the regulars. It excited me to make $6 more an hour than my grocery store job. I felt successful. I made connections there. But the year my dad died, everything just kind of fell apart. I would have taken the reprimand that was (would have) being (been) handed to me without leaving the way I did but as soon as my boss’s wife cursed at me with a solid, “fuck you, that’s your job,” during a disagreement where I told her I can’t figure out what direction to move in if I get no feedback other than, “I don’t like it,” I decided I was done. I wasn’t going to deal with that then or ever. Or so I thought.
My next job was definitely a rollercoaster. It was a male-dominated company (in a male-dominated industry), and I was the token woman (the employee handbook was revised immediately after I was hired to include specific regulations on types of clothing that was NOT allowed, one of those articles being “shorts/skirts/dresses shorter than fingertip length”) despite there being other (older) women working there prior to my onboarding. I was the only one who worked both in the office with a desk and in the shop with the dirt. (This explains why my car desperately needs upholstery detail.)
Despite that, I had most weekends off, earned OT when i worked a Saturday or past the end of my shift. I was usually exempt from the “no overtime” rule when company money was tight because they needed me. I wore 5 different hats here and felt powerful. But the last year and a half I was at the company, things changed and I became miserable. It was time for me to move on because I realized I wasn’t moving up, just getting more responsibility with no shift in compensation. I got along with all of my coworkers and was good at what I did. I learned a LOT there and I appreciate the opportunity and experience.
I was dismissed from this job a week or two shy of my 5-year anniversary due to a few different bullshit reasons, none of which were contestable because they held truth and New Jersey is an at-will state. A few weeks prior to my “lay off” (the term we used so I could collect unemployment), my boss there held the door open for me after laying into the draftsman and me about a crazy mistake that was 100% NOT our fault (storytime later) for a good five minutes and said, “if [I] didn’t like it, [I] could get the fuck out.” In case you couldn’t tell, he was a very classy man with pristine vocabulary. That last year and a half, he singlehandedly caused the low morale at this place, where walking into the shop every morning immediately turned your blue sky black.
When I moved on from there, I was picked up by a company in the same field, but rather than being manufacturing/production, it was the office side where it was still male-dominated, but there were plenty more women who were all doing the same thing as me. It was a brokerage, if you will (I believe Google has them categorized as interior design or something). I moved into a dual-role position which would prove to be a complete sham. I was promised puppies, candy, and rainbows. The owner badgered me for months to take a job with them, going as far as creating a company email address for me to use while I was freelancing for them and eventually he cornered me in a coffee shop. He told me I was already doing what he was hiring me for and let me name my price. He painted this vivid portrait of the company, its mission, and the golden expectations and generous benefits and said sometimes there are lulls where we could take an hour to just whatever and then come back and work. Everyone got along and it was a great atmosphere. The staff was very young, so it was kind of odd knowing I was part of the “older crowd”.
I caved, named a price, signed an offer letter accepting employment, and began the worst job I would ever hold in my life.
This was the job that encouraged me to ask about work-life balance in every interview from the moment I submitted my resignation letter, 9 months after I started. I felt cheated, lied to, and frustrated at the way this company operated. I felt like no one in management cared and my colleagues were too afraid to speak up. To them, they were young, the money was good, so they would just shut up and work. My mental health took a nose dive three months in and eventually tanked completely. I would wake up in tears. I struggled to get out of bed. I was always tense, angry. I started lashing out at others, and honestly wanted to stop waking up because what kind of hellhole did I dig myself into?
Colleagues trusted me enough to share with me intimate things like how on their way to an install site, they’d break down in the cab or Uber they called and for the ten minutes they were in that NYC traffic, they sobbed and snotted all over themselves because they were stressed and tired.
A couple of my colleagues were students—one in undergrad preparing to graduate and one in graduate school trying to expand her horizons. They were promised part time, hourly wages. Part time silently turned into full time with overtime. Again, the money was too good to say no. The undergrad was offered a position after graduation (he was an intern) but when he said he would need a month because he wanted to take a break and go backpacking, they told him never mind and retracted the offer. The graduate student didn’t sleep because after work, she had classes and schoolwork.
One of my teammates said to me, trying to pass it as something that wasn’t a big deal, that he woke in the middle of the night several times every night because he would dream/think about the emails he didn’t respond to. I asked him if he was joking and he said he wasn’t, but tried to laugh it off. Another colleague who had been there at least three years told me she would work until 3-4 am most nights to finish drawings and things she didn’t have time to do while on site at installs so she wouldn’t get in trouble. She would run on 2-4 hours of sleep a night just to have to do it all over again. She was afraid of being yelled at for not having something done even though she was doing everything.
This wasn’t OK to me. This….was not healthy. I demanded a meeting with the director of operations who seemed to be the only person at this god damn company who would listen to me and cared. But even then, I got laughed at and told it probably wasn’t true. Another teammate of mine who attended this meeting called me afterward and thanked me for sticking up for them. I told him it was no problem, but because I knew nothing would be done, I decided then I would plan my resignation.
To add further context, this same company gave us a week off between Christmas and New Year's Day, but during that week, if we had an install scheduled, we had to be on-site for the duration of that install, even if it meant all day. If we had drawings to complete, we had to do them and submit. We had to respond to clients and internal requests. I spent at least half that "time off" working. It was expected and was verbalized in an email sent to all employees at all of the offices.
I once took a day off to go to my cousin's Ph.D convocation and celebrate with her family. I made sure everyone knew this. I still received phone calls and messages the entire time I was out. I even responded in my messages that I wasn't home and wouldn't be for some time because I was at an important event. It didn’t stop them from asking questions about drawings and status of production.
Another time I needed a couple of hours for a doctor's appointment. I was having a medical issue and needed this visit. (In fact, it was during my time at this job I had more and more medical issues. It was due to stress, but I didn’t know at the time.) I made sure my online status reflected this and that everyone knew. Yet, I still received calls and messages from colleagues while in the waiting room where using your phone was discouraged.
It was like when I signed that offer letter I missed the fine print that said my time was now theirs at all hours of the day. I didn’t have time for friends, family, and I knew that with graduate school starting later that year, I wouldn’t have time for that. Hell, I didn’t even have time for myself anymore.
I ended up leaving this job after 9 months because it became mentally taxing and while the money and benefits were great, I decided my mental health and well being were more important so I liberated myself of this torture.
Eventually, I ran out of money and was relying on support from my significant other. Bills didn’t stop coming, so I had to withdraw my Acorns savings and my SIMPLE IRA. I was ashamed, embarrassed. I decided a few months break would be OK. I would work on my portfolio (hello website) and get myself together to jump back into the workforce. I was starting graduate school so that was something to look forward to as well. I would be fine.
Except, I had trouble getting interviews and then the big C made its debut in March of the following year. So now no one was working and everyone was panicking. I was not fine.
I was able to take a job at the end of 2020 with a company that, honestly, has impressed me. I don’t love the job I’m in. But I’m using the opportunity to learn and network and I have the GREATEST support system at this place. My colleagues are all so amazing and helpful and I can’t celebrate them in words the way I want to. Even the VP of solutions marketing who said his decision was hard in the hiring process for when I was trying to get a spot on his team, but he passed my information along to brand marketing because he said he was just that impressed.
With this job, I have time for friends, family… I successfully completed my master’s degree with a 3.93 GPA, made fabulous friends, and I even have time for myself. My work-life balance is pretty much perfect.
While I am looking to move forward, I have a crystal clear understanding of what I want out of a role, my career. I’m going to keep working to get to where I’m trying to go, but I’m also not going to settle for anything less.
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